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Departing Regent Park tenants leave goodbye messages behind

Yvette and her kids wrote on the walls of their townhouse, which has since been demolished as part of the TCHC's revitalization project.

The latest demolition of Regent Park housing reveals messages left on the walls at tenants were relocated to other Toronto Community Housing buildings.
(Steve Russell / Toronto Star) | Order this photo

On the morning of the last day, with belongings packed up and stowed away, Yvette stood in her home and wondered how to say goodbye.

Her daughter had the answer.

“Why don’t we write something on the walls?”

Their building, a Toronto Community Housing Corporation townhouse unit in Regent Park, was set to be torn down as part of the ongoing revitalization of the neighbourhood. They’d lived in the row of homes at 44 Wyatt Walk since around 2001. Surely the walls were theirs to write on.

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“Go for it,” Yvette told her daughter. Then she grabbed a marker, too.

The building has since been demolished, with nothing left but the pits of the basements where their home once stood.

But at first, just the walls of the structure had been ripped off, leaving a jagged, half-standing hulk near River St. and Dundas St. E.

And the messages left by Yvette and her family were visible from the street.

“Love this house,” Yvette’s youngest daughters wrote on their pink bedroom wall.

Yvette, in her own room, scrawled: “May God Bless us all in our new home.” She drew a smiley face for punctuation.

“I moved here when I was expecting my second child,” said Yvette, who has three kids of her own and two step-kids.

“My girls, they know no other home than this home.”

After 13 years in their four-bedroom low-income townhouse in the east side downtown neighbourhood, the family was forced to pack up and leave when TCHC turned over the property to a developer working on the latest phase of the decades-long Regent Park Revitalization project. Dilapidated buildings are gradually being razed and replaced by mixed-income housing, new space for businesses, a community centre, pool and athletic facilities, all connected fully to the city’s normal street grid.

In all, TCHC has promised to replace 2,083 rent-geared-to-income units — 1,800 in the original area and 266 nearby — while bringing in 5,000 new market-rate condo units. New buildings in the first phase have already been finished, with some earlier displaced tenants enjoying new units. Meanwhile, other old buildings have been reduced to rubble.

But like many of the 7,500 TCHC tenants who lived in the old Regent Park, Yvette and her family have had to relocate, at least for a while, to new digs elsewhere in the city, which the housing agency co-ordinated through a lottery system.

“I liked living (in Regent Park),” Yvette told the Star.

“It was a neighbourhood that could be extremely dangerous, but at the same time, us as neighbours, we took care of each other.”

Yvette came north to Toronto in 1991, chasing the possibility of a “better life” from her native Jamaica. Though she acknowledges that she had “challenging times” getting settled in Canada, she accepts that as simply part of life.

She got married and moved into her Wyatt Walk townhouse 13 years ago, which became home base for her three children and two step-kids.

Even though the buildings in her area had fallen into harsh disrepair over the years — “There were times you would put your finger in a wall and it would push through to the next room” — Yvette said her family thrived in the neighbourhood.

She credits the Pathways to Education program, for instance, with helping her stepdaughters and her son get inspired at school. One stepdaughter has since gone on to graduate from York University, while another child is at school in Kitchener and the third at George Brown College, Yvette said.

“At times, it’s hard. Here I am, working at a job making minimum wage. I want to at least find my kids not to be at the level where I am,” said Yvette, who works at a used clothing store.

Though she was sad to leave Regent Park, she’s making the most of her new home in a TCHC townhouse near Pape and Danforth. For one thing, it’s a shorter trip to work every day.

“I like living here,” she said. “I wanted my kids to know that it’s not where you live, it’s how you live.”

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